Thursday, April 24, 2014

"Faded Photographs" presentation is on YouTube

I opened a YouTube channel yesterday for the Lucas County Historical Society and posted the "Faded Photographs" slideshow, figuring some not able to get to Monday's annual meeting might be interested in taking a look at it.


Be warned that there is no audio. With narration, the program took just under an hour. Without, the video runs about 15 minutes. Each slide contains written narration, however, and that carries the presentation along. If it had occurred to me beforehand that this might go up online, I'd have written more in a couple of instances.

So far, this is the only video posted to the channel, but we have a few more candidates at the museum and I'd expect some of those to go up as time passes, so stay tuned.

I was surprised at how simple the YouTube process is, but a little time-consuming. It takes forever to upload a video, for example

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The idea behind the program was to bring into the light a few of the hundreds and hundreds (actually more like thousands) of images that have been entrusted to the historical society over the years.

Like many other museums of our type, we're balanced precariously atop a huge pile of paper, all of it historic, much of it barely accessible. Paper is relatively easy to store, but challenging to display. Even more challenging to search.

The fairly recent introduction of computer-based cataloging systems and the possibility of digital display now offer all sorts of possibilities, but an intimidating amount of human labor is required to make technology work.

We're working gradually to process and divide images into an archival storage system makes them more accessible, but ....

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